This blog is written by a journalist based in Mumbai who writes about cities, the environment, developmental issues, the media, women and many other subjects.The title 'ulti khopdi' is a Hindi phrase referring to someone who likes to look at things from the other side.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Censorship, the Emergency and Himmat

June 23, 2015

It's almost 40 years since the
Emergency was declared. Those of us who lived through it have many
memories. We should have recorded them. But we got caught up in events
and I plead guitly for not having taken the time to write about that
period while memories were still fresh.

Here's something I've written in Scroll.in that gives a flavour of those times:

Photo Credit: Kalpana Sharma

Forty years
ago on a rainy evening in Mumbai, a group of friends met in an
apartment overlooking Grant Road Bridge. It was June 26, 1975. We knew
that a State of Emergency had been declared. We also knew that there
would be press censorship. But what on earth did that mean?

All
India Radio did not explain. We had to turn to BBC World Service to get a
sense of what exactly was happening. That is how we learned that
thousands of opposition leaders and political workers had been arrested
under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act.

Some of us in that room were journalists. We worked with a small English-language weekly, Himmat, edited by Rajmohan Gandhi. What would censorship mean for us?

When we went into work the next morning, we heard that the government had sent out “guidelines”
that the press had to follow. Number one on the list was: “Where news
is plainly dangerous, newspapers will assist the Chief Press Adviser by
suppressing it themselves. Where doubts exist, reference may and should
be made to the nearest press adviser.” Clearly we had to decide what is
“dangerous”.

The guidelines also instructed us not to reproduce
rumours or anything “objectionable” that had been printed outside India.
Given that only newspapers outside India were reporting what was
actually going on in the country, this pretty much foreclosed reporting
on anything.

Roller-coaster ride

The next
20 months were a roller-coaster ride, but one that formed us as
journalists. The principle lesson we learned was that freedom of the
press is not a luxury that the rulers bestow on you: it is a lifeline in
an unequal society like ours. Without it, the poor would become
invisible because it would deprive them of their basic right to be heard
as citizens in a democracy.

As the majority of Indians today
were not even born when Emergency was declared and this also applies to
most of the journalists in the trade today, let me just briefly recount
my own experience with censorship.

In the initial days, there was
confusion in the press about what censorship would involve. The office
of the Director of Information and Publicity of the Maharashtra
government had been converted into the Censor’s office, employing around
15 people. Binod Rau, a former resident editor of the Indian Express,
was the Censor. An official from this office was sent to each daily
newspaper in the evening. But by September 20, 1975, it became evident
that it would be impossible to pre-censor every single word that
appeared in print. Hence, we were informed that we were expected to
“self-censor” and abide by the guidelines.

White-out protest

In the two issues that came out after the declaration of Emergency, Himmat
chose to leave its Editorials blank. Thereafter, we decided that we
would write as we always did until we were informed that we had violated
some guideline. That didn’t take long. In our issue of October 24,
1975, we had carried a report about a prayer meeting at Raj Ghat held on
October 2 at whic Acharya JB Kripalani had spoken. The police broke up
the meeting and arrested those who refused to leave, including our
editor-in-chief Rajmohan Gandhi and his brother, Ramchandra Gandhi.
Although they were released later, some of the others spent several
months in prison.

By then, I was the editor of Himmat. I was summoned to the office of the Special Press Advisor (as the Censor was known) and informed that as Himmat
had violated the guidelines, we would be under pre-censorship with
immediate effect. When I asked which guideline, there was no answer.
Finally, one official told me that they had been berated by Delhi for
allowing the item on the Rajghat meeting to appear.

Despite this,
we found ways to dodge the censor. Additionally, the Bombay High Court
ruling in April 1976 in the Binod Rau vs MR Masani case on censorship
provided some breathing space. Amongst other things, the Court ruled
that “if there is a right to praise either an individual or the
government, there is equally a right to criticise the individual or the
government…”

For a couple of months, everything was quiet. Then
in July 1976, someone from the Criminal Investigation Department turned
up at our office with a notice stating that the printer and publisher of
Himmat (Rajmohan Gandhi) had to deposit Rs 20,000 within 15
days with the Commissioner of Police because there were “prejudicial
reports” in three issues in April. No details were given. These details
were provided only when we went to court challenging censorship
guidelines. Apparently, we had quoted Mahatma Gandhi saying, “The
restoration of free speech, free association and free press is almost
the whole of Swaraj” was considered “prejudicial”.

Arbitrary rules

I
give these details to illustrate the arbitrariness of censorship during
those times. Yet, we had decided that we would rather continue to push
the envelope and take risks than buckle under censorship. Such bravado
meant that the press where we printed was served a notice to stop
printing Himmat, andno other printing press would touch us. Of
course, we did not have the money to buy our own printing machines. In
desperation, we put out an appeal to our readers. Amazingly, hundreds of
readers responded, sending us contributions as small as Rs 5 and going
up to a few thousand rupees. We managed to collect over Rs 60,000 and
with some additional funds bought two small printing machines and rented
a space in an industrial estate in Prabhadevi. This allowed us to have
our own print line and take the risk we felt we must.

Unfortunately,
this arrangement was also busted when the authorities found that the
bulk of the magazine was being printed elsewhere. So finally, in
December 1976, we were left with no option but to go every week to the
Censor’s office and be subjected to the irrational and arbitrary
slashing of copy. To fill these spaces at the last minute was virtually
impossible. Yet we had to because leaving blank pages was also a crime!

The
Emergency ended in March 1977 after the spectacular election that threw
Indira Gandhi out of office. Although on paper censorship continued
during the election campaign, no one paid any heed to it.

The lessons of 1975

Looking
back now, four decades later, has the Indian press learned anything
from that experience? Do we value the freedom that was snatched away
from us?

Some of us as journalists certainly learned important
lessons. The 1970s was still a time of idealism. I can count many of my
contemporaries who came into journalism believing that our job was to
seek the truth and write without fear.

Once the Emergency ended,
many such journalists took it upon themselves to unearth the stories
that had been suppressed, stories that above all denied poor people
their rights. These included slum demolitions in many cities, forcible
sterilisation campaigns, torture of prisoners, fake encounters and many
others.

Instead of merely reporting on these atrocities, and
others like bonded labour, trafficking, denial of human rights, the
rights of pavement dwellers and more, journalists followed up these
stories by filing Public Interest Litigations in the Supreme Court. No
one charged them with being “unprofessional” or “activist journalists”.
In the mood that prevailed then, it was accepted that even as we are
journalists, we are also citizens and cannot stand by and watch such
egregious violations of rights.

If you survey the Indian press of
the late 1970s into the 1980s, you see the results of such a commitment
by scores of journalists. Newspapers gave space for such writing, even
encouraged it. And even though several smaller publications like Himmat
closed down because the economics did not work out, many mainstream
publications took up the task of unearthing the developments that were
hidden during the Emergency.

New priorities

Since
the 1990s, there has been a visible change in the Indian media. For
one, print is not so dominant, yielding space to the electronic media.
In the last few years, the Internet has opened up new spaces.

The
growth and variety of the media suggests that there should be greater
freedom, that it would be virtually impossible today for the State to
control the media. Certainly the kind of censorship regime imposed by
Indira Gandhi in 1975 would never work today.

Yet, has the space
for the kind of writing spawned by the experience of Emergency shrunk or
expanded? This is a question we still have to ask.

While the
expansion of the media space would suggest that there would be much more
room for writing on poverty, on human rights, on the invisible and
marginal parts of India, on communities that are forgotten, the reverse
is true. In a media driven by the market, such news has no value. So
while earlier, falling foul of the government restricted the pursuit of
such stories, today the belief that such news will not sell your product
denies them space.

Secondly, how do we define “free” in relation
to the media? “Free” of what or whom? Perhaps the State does not have
the same ability it had in the past to control the content of even
privately owned media, but today there are other forces that do. When
politics and business come together, and define what can or cannot be
reported, is this not a form of covert censorship? The increasing
consolidation of media ownership in a few powerful hands, and the nexus
between some of these owners and the people in power, gives an entirely
different spin to the concept of a “free” media.

What remains the
same is the choice that journalists have to make. During the Emergency,
as LK Advani famously noted, although the press was asked to bend, it
chose to crawl. Yet many journalists chose not to do so, at considerable
risk to themselves and their careers.

That choice is one that we
still have to make. If even under overt censorship, some publications
managed to communicate the truth to their readers, why can't journalists
do it under the indirect forms of control that exist today?

Kalpana Sharma was editor of Himmat from 1976 to 1981 when it closed. She has worked with The Indian Express, The Times of India and The Hindu and is currently consulting editor with Economic and Political Weekly.

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My profile

Journalist, columnist, writer based in Mumbai. Author of "Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia's largest slum" (Penguin, 2000). Worked with The Hindu, Times of India, Indian Express and Himmat Weekly.
Other books include "Whose News? The Media and Women's Issues" edited with Ammu Joseph (published by Sage 1994/2006), "Terror Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out" edited with Ammu Joesph (published by Kali for Women, 2003) and "Missing: Half the Story, Journalism as if Gender Matters" (published by Zubaan, 2010).
Regular columns in The Hindu, Sunday Magazine and on The Hoot (www.thehoot.org).